Writing tips and links, book promotion and marketing ideas, as well as updates on all my various writing projects.

John P. McCann (or JP Mac) is an Emmy-award winning animation scribe who has written on such shows as Animaniacs, Freakazoid!, Pinky and the Brain, Catscratch, and Kung Fu Panda. His first horror novel, Hallow Mass, is available on Amazon in softcover and ebook formats.

Thursday, December 15, 2011

'Chipwrecked' Review Up at F.O.G.

(Forces of Geek once again hosts my cinematic take on an upcoming release.)

Not since Goin’ Coconuts has a tropical movie misfired on so many cylinders. No amount of witty lines can lighten arson, murder, and a descent into barbarism.

13 comments:

I read your review last night and meant to comment: I am deeply sorry that you had to endure this one. I just read somewhere that the heavy in the piece -- David Cross -- said this was the worst experience of his professional career. He gave no details. But it's hard to believe him, since Cross was in the movie "Year One."

Parenthetically, I just learned that Mr. Cross and I have the same birthday. But we did not have the same Mohel.

I was required to do an in-depth study of "Lord of the Flies" for the Advanced Creative Writing class I took in college along with some 30 other students. The teacher broke us up into several small groups and each group had to deliver a group paper and lecture on one of the book's themes and how Golding used that theme symbolically in the story.

Did I mention that there were 30+ students in the class? One must wonder how many legitimate symbolic themes Golding actually intended.

And each group was ASSIGNED a theme -- we didn't get to pick from a list or come up with one of our own. My group (which immediately nominated me as the group leader because they didn't want to do any work) was given the task of explaining the allegorical depth of the viney tangley things that lined the jungle floor. There wasn't even enough evidence in the book to support that they were an actual, intentional allegorical symbol.

And the group which had picked me as leader was of no help, so I just made it all up.

I had already read LOF in high school... and for fun, if you can believe that. I liked the book. So it put me ahead of the game in that class.

But when the teacher gave us the assignment of researching an obscure and insignificant plot element (if it even was intentionally symbolic by Golding), it was a bit of a blindside.

It turned out to be a genuinely creative writing (and speaking) assignment. You know how Jim Carrey made talking out of his butt famous in "Ace Ventura"? It was kind of like that.

And thanks for the congrats on the gig, but at this point it's kind of an "old" one. I was cast in this animated pilot over a year ago, but have only recorded 8 pages of the script so far. I'm learning firsthand how long the development process takes in animation sometimes.